From Dragon to Phoenix

Jinzhou is not a city I’d love to see twice. So I decided no
sooner than I had traveled a few blocks its downtown. In front of
me was an assembly of largely untenanted high-rises tarted up with
quasi-mansard roofs. Atop three of them stood characters saying
Man-Ha-Dun, for Manhattan in mandarin. I was walking down a street
whose pavement broken here and there to reveal the dirt underneath,
as if the place was very recently bombarded. The passersby with
worried expressions like war-refugees helped finish a
Guernica-esque scene.

It’s a city never shaken off its war memories. This feel
strengthened when I stood in the shadow of the Liaoshen Campaign
Memorial, a museum built to celebrate the communists’ decisive
victory over the army of China’s then Nationalist government in a
gory battle in 1948. As a result, the winner claimed the Northeast,
a region of major industries and natural resources, before taking
over the whole country in barely a year.

As the most notable site in town, the building in front of me
recalled a haunted old house. Not only was it crowded with the
weapons, from rifles to tanks used by both sides in the civil war,
but also the fallen soldiers that revisited the former killing
field as ghostly revenants. But my sentiment decided not to last
too long. The purpose of my trip was to visit some much older
ghosts, geologically much older. I still had to a long way to go
into the countryside of Yixian, a nearby county.

In the recent two decades, the Yixian Formation, a geological
formation in the Jinzhou area which spans more than ten million
years in the early cretaceous period, has become a rich mine of
fossils. Shale flakes with impressions of Lycoptera, an extinct
fish, or early flowering plants are sold in the adjacent towns at
surprisingly modest price. Most notable are the petrified dinosaur
relics which are available, too, in the black market. Once in
Chaoyang, a nearby town, a guard at an ancient Pagoda accosted me
with a picture of Psittacosaur, a parrot-beaked dinosaur of a
poodle’s size, saying “this stuff takes you thirty grands. But back
in Beijing, you can give it to your boss as a gift worth a hundred
thousand yuan.”

When fossils of rarer species are involved, forgeries often find
a place in the market. The most infamous case was the Archaeoraptor
scandal. In 1999 National Geographic published an article declaring
that the informally named specimen in question from Liaoning
indicated a “missing link” between theropod dinosaurs and birds.
But as experts soon proved, it was a collage pieced up with real
fossils from different animals.

In Yixian, the story started in 2004 when a former discovered a
7 meter long Jinzhousaurus, a cousin of Iguanodon. The windfall
find encouraged the local and provincial government to think about
turning the agricultural backwater into a magnet for scientists,
students and tourists from all over the world. They convinced the
central government in Beijing that it was a good idea to
green-light a project allowing a foreign company to own a joint
venture up to 51% so that it could build a cultural center with
funds raised abroad. The result is Yizhou Fossil and Geology Park
whose construction completed in 2006.

The museum was located farther than an hour’s drive from the
city and there was no public traffic going to my destination. When
the taxi I took leapt forward along the country road, the driver
told me that it was a nearby iron mine to blame for many trucks
transporting ore pellets leaked badly but no one had ever bothered
to clean up the messes and finally ruined the road. He gave me some
information like that along the way as if providing some extra
service to immune him from feeling guilty before overcharging me.
He was also inquisitive about my relationship with the lao-wai
(foreigner) who ran the museum.

The lao-wai in question was Damien Leloup, the museum’s manager
and curator from Paris. Despite his Gallic good looks, he carried
with him an air that seemed more international than French. Though
a student of art history, he started his career as in Australia
recovering a shipwreck and worked for WWF to help Madagascar make
its last intact rain forest a national park. He later worked with
Jacques Cousteau in Southeast Asia and Africa. After the demise of
the legendary maritime explorer, the French government sent him to
the Reunion for military training. Eventually he landed in China to
help establish a museum. He was proud for professionally living a
child’s dream that seemed everlasting.

The museum he showed me around was a building modest in size and
geometrically sleek in form. It looked more like a recluse research
center rather than a showplace intended to attract the public
attention. In fact, it was built right on the fossil quarry. Once a
new fossil turned up, it was immediately sent to the lab a few
hundred meters away. The exhibits housed inside strayed even
further from those pantheons of monsters at the heart of the
natural history museums you see in some American major cities and
European capitals.

The “dragon bones” later unearthed in Liaoning are much unlike
the daunting terrible lizards such as the giant sauropods or super
terminators led by T. rex, which have long stood for the synonym of
Dinosauria in our imagination, a stereotype consolidated by popular
media from Charles Knight’s museum art to the Spielberg movies.
Agile, delicate creatures including Confuciusornis and
Sinosauropterix, often covered with proto-feathers, they are
primitive birds or avian-bound bipedal predators whose posterities
would later take off to survive the mass extinction 65 million
years ago when a planetoid supposedly hit what is now the Yucatán
Peninsula. With the celestial impact and its nuclear winter-like
aftermath came the downfall of the dinosaurian dynasty.

When we strolled in the compound behind the main building, I
noticed a dozen round floors in the shape of helipad flagged with
red bricks. Damien told me they were where Mongolian-styled yurts
would be set up in the warmer days to come. Visiting scientists,
students and Dino-nuts tourists could then spend several days here
to work together with the experts in residence to dig fossils in
the quarry and prepare them in the laboratory. Camping outdoors
might allow them to feel like the characters in the novels of
Michael Crichton during their stay. Then he said that the
scientists had recently found footprints of large sauropods, which
had been long thought only existing in the Jurassic formations in
southern China, as well as remains of pterosaur, a winged reptile
that used to soar in the Mesozoic sky. They together suggested a
much richer paleo-biology of a swamp area.

The museum management cares about the ecological environment
today as much as the prehistoric past of it. A protection project
was conducted: with a pond dug in the park and thousands of trees
planted to bring back life to a land largely dead due to industrial
pollution. Batrachians were among the first that returned
(frogspawns could be seen underwater), followed with a variety of
birds. Soon enough hedgehogs and hares appeared and many settled
down.

The foreigners’ green efforts were not always appreciated,
nevertheless, especially when they planned to introduce equipments
such as solar panels and a wind-driven turbine to generate
electricity. The leaders of the local power plant regarded those
contraptions as a threat. “But owning the Joint Venture at 51% has
given us a very substantial advantage that turned out to be really
useful when the time came to ‘impose’ some of our ideas. That being
said, I have no doubt that if the issue was of the outmost
importance for them, the local powers could find a way to impose
their thoughts and need. Fortunately it has not been the case yet.”
So Damien told me.

The YFGP employs most staff locally. The meagerly educated
farmers are often skillful field workers with astonishing knowledge
on fossils and dinosaurs, though the academic jargon is not their
cup of tea. They can be as efficient as seasoned paleontologists
when excavation and fossil preparation are involved, if not more
so, for they started handling fossils since very early age. Some of
them are trained to cast fossil replicas with natural resin
imported from France, supposedly an environment-friendly material.
The office assistants are local hires, too. With them, Damien once
hoped to have more chance to speak Chinese. But as it soon turned
out, it was him who helped them practice English.

The main exhibition hall, dimly lighted through artificial
foliages of conifers and early leafy trees, sank in an idyllic
atmosphere. Like most natural history museums, the YFGP arranged
the exhibits in a linear order to narrate the story of evolution,
especially the episodes concerning with the Cretaceous animals and
the ecological contexts they confronted. When we walked past a
large limestone plate hung heavily on the wall, I saw a figure loom
like bas-relief on it, demonstrating an ancient crocodile whose
eyes crossed to meet somewhere down the prolonged snout. “We
nickname this croc Sarkozy,” said Damien. He then pointed to two
clusters of eggs in a glass case. “Do you know why these eggs are
perfectly spherical and those elongated? Because the former are of
the herbivorous dinosaurs’ while the latter of the predators.” That
was news to me.

When great paleontologists John Ostrom and Robert Bakker
portrayed the prehistoric reptiles as smart, active, warm-blooded
and the ancestors of birds, they were painting on a large but
somewhat porous canvas. In recent years, however, Chinese
scientists such as Xu Xing and Ji Qiang, among others, discovered
and described a number of previously unknown species that may fill
up some holes in the theoretical picture.

Ours is an age knowledge renews without much patience. In the
recent decade or two, fossils from Liaoning made headlines in
publications like Science and Nature, contributing to the
dinosaur-to-bird metamorphosis theory ascending from heresy to
accepted wisdom. Paleo-artists compete to depict the once
ferociously looking theropods, especially the Velociraptor, with
increasingly sophisticated plumage that gives the animals a very
kawaii image. Sometimes I wonder if these antediluvian
creatures that failed to board Noah’s Ark are well underway to
replace the giant panda by making a new ascot of China.